Were you among the throngs who YouTubed cool-as-a-cuke President Obama after he withstood the rebel yell heckling of Joe Wilson?

You remember Joe. He's the GOP representative from South Carolina who became an early adopter of Sarah Palin's falsity that Democratic health care reform would encourage old people to forgo medical help. It was Wilson who shouted two little words at Obama, reducing a president who thinks in complete sentences to momentary speechlesness and causing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to purse her lips like a playground monitor in uncomfortable shoes.

According to YouTube's eyeball count, nearly a million people have since viewed clips from Obama's Sept. 9 speech, when he broke a summer of silence to argue in favor of health care reform that today may hinge on a few swing votes.

But of course you remember Joe Wilson. He's the guy who confused a joint session of Congress with townhall shoutfests that passed for populist debate on Obama's initiative -- a plan that dared suggest the United States consider universal coverage and join trailblazing nations like, oh, say, Bhutan.

Wilson's cry of "You lie!" came as Obama explained -- slowly and again -- that proposed reform would not add illegal immigrants to government insurance rolls. Along with the Palin tweet that coined "death panels," Wilson's blurt was named this week among top quotes that best sum up the year's political mood by "The Yale Book of Quotations."

But unlike poor Joe Biden, who could only wag his head in a "what's-the-world-coming-to?" way, I'm not dismayed at Wilson's unprecedented outburst. I'm grateful.

And so are lots of other instructors who recognize "You lie!" as the kind of overheated, unsupported, categorical claim that sinks so much student writing. For here was a member of Congress, live and in prime time, bellowing an illogical enthymeme (more on that in a minute) that would embarrass any college freshman.

Here was the teachable Toulmin moment.

Trained in mathematics and physics, London-born Stephen Toulmin was convinced that if wrested from the atmospherics of Plato, philosophy had a lot to teach the rest of us who seldom confront allegorical caves but who stumble all the time over how to think well. Toulmin, who died Dec. 4 in Los Angeles of heart failure, preached "practical moral reasoning," his term for getting at Truth by analyzing facts and assumptions in everyday matters.

"I had always hoped to relate philosophical issues to practical experience," Toulmin once wrote. That effort led him in 1958 to largely junk formal logic -- think Descartes abstractions here -- and suggest instead a six-part system familiar to college debaters and computer scientists alike.

But in an era when public discourse is too easily hijacked by Twitter tweets and teabaggers, Toulmin's greatest contribution is an emphasis on the persuasive power of facts, strategically aimed at specific people and delivered at a specific time and place. With a Toulmin cheat sheet in his pocket (I'd be happy to share mine), Wilson's thinking the night he became a Letterman punchline might have gone something like this.

"Obama's starting to bug me, dang it. His delivery, his facts, his rhetoric are just so . . . wait! Did he just say illegals wouldn't be covered? But I disagree! Stick to the truth, Mr. President!

"Now let's see. According to this here Toulmin guy, stick to the truth is an enthymeme, an illogical statement because I haven't said why. If I could add hard facts - thanks again, S.T. - I could be a hero. Without data and reasoning, I'd be a goat...."

And sooner than you could say "hands off my Medicare," Wilson would realize that a packed congressional chamber probably was not conducive to explaining why he believed Obama was fibbing. Channeling Toulmin again, Wilson would know that to really carry the day, he'd have to consider his assertion from different points to view, maybe explain why a president with political capital on the line might stretch the truth a teensy bit.